HTML Giant reviews Andrew Zornoza’s Where I Stay

…A refreshing, pitch-perfect kind of steering that is innovative not only for the genre it might get called into, but for experiential and language-focused texts of every stripe.

Immediately striking for its beautifully designed horizontal 8”x5” shape, Where I Stay is a dual kind of amalgam…. There is violence and desperation. There is music and shithole buildings. Dirt. There is sky. Moments told for how they are and how they were in sentences that for their unassuming aura moreso sting….

While each graph and location could be self contained for Zornoza’s striking lines, meditative and rhythmic in the mind of Mary Robison mashed with William Vollmann, the prose in sequence forms a narrative of seeking, of looking for something familiar in so much splay. The unbounded point-to-point of the narrator’s surroundings, in which he works strange crap jobs, meets roadside strangers, deals with his life, contains no abject want for summation, and yet therein reaches beyond⎯the narrative in beautifully and concretely rendered fragments evicts a true sense of drift, though within the drift, the body….

Zornoza’s knack for rendering the momentary in timeless, syllabic lines, to cut to the blood of the line in an effortless, truly fevered sort of way, is not only refreshing, it is unforgettable. Though he is smart enough to keep the moment by moment phrasing quick and vivid, line by line, there are no exits pulled in the overall collage that results from all the wanting, from the haunting viscera there contained.